Cosmopolitan Germans have long flaunted their worldliness by littering their speech with Anglicisms, whether striking a deal over "ein Business-Lunch" or discussing the threat of "ein Cyberkrieg". Now, a brand of low-fat foods has jumped on the bandwagon, urging German customers to "fuck the diet".

The profane slogan is being used to flog Unilever's Du darfst (literally: you may, or you're allowed) range of allegedly healthy products.

The new advert tells German women - in their native tongue - that the range is for "those who don't want to hold back, those who want to eat until they are full." Accompanying images of beautiful women with excellent teeth slurping low-fat spaghetti bolognaise, the voiceover says, "You can't be bothered to count calories? Then don't! With Du darfst, you can enjoy yourself without worrying - Du darfst means above all that you don't have to do anything. Just help yourself: fuck the diet!"

It hasn't gone down too well with some of the target group, with women taking to the official Du darfst Facebook page to deride the slogan "as neither big nor clever" and ask "who did you pay to come up with this?"

Every time the creep of "Denglisch" hits the headlines, there is much soul-searching over whether the language of Goethe and Schiller will soon be consigned to history. When the verb "leaken" was voted Anglicism of the year in 2011 in the aftermath of the Wikileaks furore, the German Language Association (Verein Deutsche Sprache), moaned to the Guardian: "There seems to be this attitude that English is somehow 'better' than German, that German somehow sounds old-fashioned, particularly for a certain group of people."

Holger Klatte, a spokesman for the VDS, noted back then that there was already a perfectly good alternative to leak – durchsickern, which means to percolate. In the name of keeping the German language alive, here's the German for Du darfst's new catchphrase: "Scheiß auf Diät!", literally "Shit on the diet!". Hmm. You can kind of see why they didn't go for that one.